City expects another lead grant

Thursday

GALESBURG — The city of Galesburg expects to receive another forgivable loan next year in order to complete phase three of its lead service line replacement project.

The project’s third phase would cover the replacement of approximately 500 private lead water service lines in the city with a forgivable loan of approximately $2 million. The city expects to receive the grant in February or March 2019 at the earliest, start the phase three replacements in April and finish them at the end of November.

Phase one of the project included the replacement of 499 service lines. Phase two, which will wrap up at the end of November, will encompass the replacement of 500 lines total. Wayne Carl, director of planning and public works for the city, estimated that 350 service lines have been replaced in the second phase so far.

The city submitted a pre-application Jan. 8 this year to receive the phase three loan through the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s Public Water Supply Loan program. Gary Bingenheimer, manager for the infrastructure financial assistance section at the IEPA, said most of the money for Galesburg’s grants has come from repayments for other loans the IEPA gave to other municipalities through its revolving loan fund.

“Our program is a state-run program that receives a federal capitalization grant each year, and that’s a very small portion of our funding,” Bingenheimer said. “Only a small portion of our total pot of money each year is that federal money. The majority of our money is repayments from previous loans.”

Carl expected bids for the project to go to the City Council in January. He also anticipated that the city would apply for a phase four grant when offered, also for $2 million that would cover the replacement of approximately 500 service lines.

“We are planning to continue getting the $2 million grant each year as long as it is available,” Carl said. “Five-hundred service lines is a lot of lines and takes the entire construction season to get (them) completed, so doing more lines would be difficult. The $2 million forgivable loan amount is a good amount and would be 100 percent forgivable; if we go above that amount, the funds would need to come from local sources or borrowed from IEPA and then paid back with local sources.”